Friday, April 25, 2008

"No more quarter hunts!"

This was my daughter Molly's response when I told her about our apartment building's gleaming new laundry room, that unlike the old one that had coin-operated machines, takes a re-fillable cash card and means we will no longer need to procure one-million-trillion quarters every time we want to do the laundry. For us, finding the requisite quantity of quarters required for even the most humble amount of laundry meant hunting around the apartment for hours in the vain hope that a stray quarter might be stowed here or there, in a random drawer, an overfilled dish or forgotten corner of the floor. This was inevitably followed by raiding the piggy bank, the tzedakah box, and on one particularly bad day, even the state quarter map.